My Plans!

So much to write, so little time! This is actually a bit of an interesting place for me to be, because usually I try and keep myself quite un-busy. Free time is fun, and I like being able to relax to that, but as of late things have actually been fairly hustled. Roleplays are moving for once, my school schedule is incredibly wonky, and I have hobbies like writing this blog and working on my cars that dip in to consume time as well. Perhaps further cementing this notion that I’m perpetually out of time, the things I want to do I have all these grandiose plans for. Right now there are three different topics that I want to write about, and there are all these things I want to do on my cars too! Given the opportunity, all these things I’ve planned to do might heap up and go from plans to requirements.

My only hope to battle such things is to take them on one at a time, of course.

See, the problem with all these plans is that they tend to bog a person down. I start looking at my homework and go, “I have homework in five classes, and I haven’t started any of it. There’s so much to do!” when the reality is that I have time to do it, and if I’m diligent I can get it done easily in my time constraint. The same thing applies to hobbies; things that aren’t necessarily pressing can get put off forever because they too feel impossible, so we had better fend it off until we have time to accomplish it all at once. Finally when you begin something like that, it’s easy to get exhausted because you’re trying to work at one slice when the whole pie is just lurking behind it.

If you’re not careful, roleplay can follow this trend exactly; it’s horrid, really. You make a character and start setting all these mental notes for them. Oh, you see, first they’re going to spend some time in the village they grew up in. Ah yes, it will be to build the character for the first time and establish their roots, hopefully meeting some new people right off the bat. Then I’ll take them into a cave where they first find out something about themselves, and then they’ll meet an extraordinary person who will change their worldview. From there I’d like them to visit this major city and get to the top of this mountain and blah blah blah. We do this, don’t we?

Oh, we make all sorts of excuses for this behavior. We talk about how planning leads us to write better. Perhaps we say that, without plans, our characters will quickly deteriorate. Maybe we make the comparison that plans are simply a result from loving the potential behind a character, and it’s those characters who have no planned future that are really dull. It’s “Just a backup plan” or “If things get stale” or perhaps to “Keep us on track” in our roleplay. We plan out the lives of our characters, every turn and every conflict, and then we expect to use them as our tracks. What we really want is to give our characters a quality shove and watch their lives play out the way we’ve destined them to.

Unfortunately, as far as roleplay goes, this is a load of crap. The real reason we do this is because planning gives us a false sense of accomplishment. Similar to the character sheet, people abuse the notion of planning for their roleplay because it makes them feel like they’ve done something, and they do this because people expect the enjoyment from roleplay to be exactly the same as everything else.

When you’re writing a book or fanfiction or whatever, nobody really writes just for themselves; a lot of the expected enjoyment is knowing  that somebody else will come along, discover what you’ve written, and enjoy it in turn. Odd, isn’t it? Now of course, there is a sense of enjoyment that comes from having a project completed, a bound book that you can raise above your head and say, “See what I have done!” But in terms of writing the individual scenes, connecting the dots of your story, and all that? Not as much.

Because enjoyment comes at the end, we go about it a certain way. A lot of authors have said that the way they approach writing a novel is they plan certain scenes and then try and get those all met by the time they finish the novel. However, planning roleplay like this will absolutely destroy your experience. Seriously! Now I have to talk about the fallout that happens from doing it!

Firstly, the inherent and obvious problem with this is that roleplay involves more than one person—if it doesn’t, that isn’t roleplay at all. The enjoyment from roleplay doesn’t come from completing things, it comes from interacting with people. So not only is RP Planning putting your foot in the wrong direction, it actually detracts from the truly fun parts. The moment you begin to plan for your character you instantly begin leaving out half of the story. RPing is about the interaction between your character and another character, so if you have already planned out your half… what room is there for any true interaction?

The very notion of roleplay is sort of like a science experiment. You have something you know (your character, presumably) and then you bash it together with something you don’t know (their character). The result should be something you could not foresee. By planning the whole experiment, it’s like trying to say that dropping a rock is interesting: it’s going to fall, hit the ground, make a noise, and then sit there. Nothing new there. It gets even worse when we start trying to make up for this by planning for the other character!

Maybe we do it explicitly, where we contact the other RPer and go “Yeah so your character should probably do this” or we do it implicitly where we don’t really leave them another option. Ultimately, this is pretty much what RP always degrades to if left unchecked. You end up with an RP thread where one person establishes the setting and everyone else just sort of follows in the wake of that.

It’s so common, in fact, that I will call it my second point of fallout. Now that you’ve successfully killed any sort of lively interaction between the characters, you’ve effectively “spoiled” yourself to the entire “story” you had intended on making. Basically you’ve transformed the roleplay into a book or fanfiction, and so you start planning it like one. You make for the big reveal at the end, and you lead everyone along with a tight leash so you can dazzle them at the end with your great climax. Only problem is that now it’s going to read like the strangest book ever since it changes perspective every half a page and always cuts off in the most awkward spots possible. If people aren’t just making every post as a reiteration of the previous one plus a sentence or two of character input, then it will probably turn into three people trying to tell different stories all at the same time. It’s a freaking disaster and it represents almost every RP thread.

Instantly we manage to degrade a spontaneous, surprising experience into… work. Awesome. What’s more, now the RP thread has a leader, which is even worse. You have one person who determines the path of the story and a bunch of other people just dragging behind you.

Yeah, good luck getting people excited to post in that.

When one person leads the entire RP, they’re probably going to only end up developing a single character. They expect you to “pitch in” and do your own share for developing your character, but they’ve asserted so much control over the whole thing that this becomes effectively impossible. The worst part is that when people do try and take some level of control, they have to wreck all the leader’s plans to do it! Once you start planning out an RP thread, you get really comfortable with it—that tends to be the only comfort, in fact—and so the second someone compromises that it leaves a sour taste and sometimes you even ask them to change their RP post, because it’s not how you wanted it to happen.

Finally, when you start planning RP threads like this it tends to just mount up in front of you. You realize that to accomplish your RP “goal” you have to do like ten roleplays to get there, and because we’re pointlessly obsessive planners we figure out what each of those are going to be. We get “RP Partners” from people we know because that’s the only way to ensure that our plans are complied with. And then… then we try and scale this mountain of an obligation that we’ve built for ourselves.

Like any sort of planning, when you overdo it you can make something that was going to be fun turn into this huge heap of responsibility. All of a sudden you’re responsible for trying to think of interesting circumstances for these people you’ve unconsciously chosen to lead (or you don’t and they stop posting) and it eventually just becomes ash on your tongue. What’s worse is that when you finally get to those parts you planned, you’ve built it up as this sacred, holy moment that will right all wrongs. Only… you find out that it’s kind of a hollow victory, since you already knew exactly what would happen, and certainly doesn’t outweigh the headache it cost you to reach.

Not only is it daunting to go after, you’ve also ruined the enjoyment of actually achieving it.

So this is the part we call the “call to action” or whatever; it’s the part where I talk about what you do instead. Thankfully I’m not a big believer in idealism, so here’s my solution for you: stop planning. Seriously, you’re just hurting the experience. Maybe you have a general sense of where you’d like things to go, given the chance, but I wouldn’t suggest going a whole lot further than that. Perhaps there are things you’d like to see happen, and that’s fine, but you need to be able to hold those things very loosely.

Your RP experience should be defined by your character’s interaction with another. Don’t think about what needs to happen next, think about what your character would do next! If you’re roleplaying as some bloodthirsty rogue who cares only about himself, act like that! Don’t just make a plan to keep the RP going, stick within the limits of what your character would do no matter what. That might mean leaving another character for dead, ending the RP early, or even trying to kill them. This fosters a sense of spontaneity in roleplay you cannot get from any other sort of writing, and I absolutely guarantee it’s more fun. It will lead you to places you never could have planned for, and it’s truly an incredible experience.

If you’ve never gotten a chance to roleplay like this, I urge you to try it. Rather than just sticking to what you’ve always known, break your plans for a bit and hold them loosely for once. Don’t decide what’s going to happen, just pick a direction and see what happens to be down there. I have never, ever seen an RP die because it was planned too little. Not only will it be easier to approach roleplay, but I can all but guarantee you that it will be more fun while you’re actually doing the roleplay. Rather than planning the whole thing out and knowing the entire story, leave some of it up to chance and don’t spoil the ending for yourself.

Seriously, it’s awesome. I put in a lot of exclamation marks to prove it!